death, love, video

THE BARRICADE

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EXTENDED VERSION

[A man in his mid-forties. He wears a suit unbuttoned at the collar, without a tie. He appears stressed, even tormented. There are big bags under his eyes]

“My wife and I were trying to conceive for years.

When all the other options failed we resorted to adoption.

After months of waiting, we were assigned to a young couple not able to care for their unborn baby… a boy.

The adoption agency said we could take him home right after the delivery, that the parents preferred it that way.

And so the baby was born on a Sunday night… and we were driving him home from the hospital by Monday at dawn.

We were so excited… especially my wife.

I was happy too, of course… but I was still getting used to it… you know, to the idea that from one moment to the next I was a father, that I was supposed to have a connection with this baby….

I didn’t have it yet, but I was confident I’d get there…

Then, just a few weeks later, we found the baby unconscious in his crib; he was very weak, pale… we rushed him to the hospital and waited while they ran tests… they were the longest hours of my life, I swear…

Long story short… he had leukemia.

He had a fifty-fifty chance of making it… and, of course, we swore to fight along with him, to do everything we could to keep him alive…

But on the inside, I was grappling with this horrible dilemma…

Should I let my love for that baby grow inside me, even if he could very possibly die at any moment?  Or should I keep a safe distance, guarding myself against whatever might happen?
It was not really a dilemma… the truth is I knew I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t love that sick baby… I didn’t know how.

My wife, unlike me, put up no barriers; she just loved the baby with all her heart… And that made it even harder for me to pretend, to conceal the fact that I didn’t feel anything for him.

But no one noticed it… I was by his side at the hospital every single night, I insisted on a second mortgage to pay for his treatment… I cried whenever he was in pain… although it was probably more for myself…

At the end the baby, my son, made it… the illness receded, like a miracle, and he started to grow as a normal child

He’s now four. His name is Eric, after me.

I still can’t get myself to love him.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

inmigration, love, religion

I SAW THE LIGHT

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[A simply dressed blue-collar type, in his late forties, with stubble beard and a Southern drawl.]

“We weren’t the churchgoing type… but when Pastor Sank arrived, everyone was sayin’ how great he was, how inspiring…

So we started attending most Sundays, the whole family.

The first time I heard Pastor Sank I thought he was too… aggressive, you know, screaming from high up on the pulpit, his face all red, sayin’ that the whole world was going to hell, that our society was rotten… He was big on the idea that all the immigrants were invadin’ our way of life.

Angry or not, his words rang true to us… probably because we had heard the same ideas in the news… and we were afraid.

Then, one Sunday, Pastor Sank announced he had had a vision and the Lord had told him that the world would end two months from then, on October the fourth.

We didn’t believe him right away. Plenty of people been scammed by this sort of thing, you know… but Pastor Sank wasn’t asking for money or anything… all he wanted was for us to follow him around the country, talking to people about his prophecy, warning them, gettin’ them to repent…

Everyone in the parish was on board…  and so were we.

I quitted my job and we sold everything. Used some of that money to fix our old RV so we could join the…. Final Crusade, that’s how Pastor Sank called it.

We drove north along the coast, stopping in every town, talkin’ to folks about the end of the world, trying to save them from the depths of hell….

It wasn’t an easy road. Some looked at us as if we was crazy… others looked on us with pity. But rest assured, if we ever needed anything, directions, or a bathroom for the kids, we could always depend on some stranger’s kindness. Yeah, we got to meet a lot of folks that way. A lot of ’em very different from us… some of ’em even immigrants.

Anyway, October the fourth came… and went… and nothing happened. Pastor Sank said it was a miscalculation; that the rapture would happen in two weeks instead…

Enough was enough.

We went back home… broke and jobless.

It took some time for us to bounce back from that slump.

But despite all that, I have no regrets… Thanks to Pastor Sank, we had a chance to see beyond our little town, to discover other people and understand how they think…

You could say we stopped being scared of the world after that trip.

We also stopped going to church.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

irony, politics

GET OUT OF LINE

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[A thirty-year-old man with a hip hairstyle and clothes. He looks timid, but speaks with firmness despite his strong accent.]

“In my country you have to stand in line for everything…  for bread, for gas, to see a doctor.

It’s a way of life… people stand in line and gossip or play games, they flirt, or even get drunk.

But I never got used to it. I hated feeling like a number, one more letter in a long sentence and with no other function but to wait, and wait, and wait…

To be clear, I’m not against order or civility, but I had the feeling those lines were not really necessary, that they were there just to give us something to do, to keep us controlled and away from any subversive tendencies.

Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. They would have laughed at me… Or worse.

In the end, it was the lines that made me realize immigrating was the only way I could live with dignity. And so I ended up in this country… don’t ask me how.

I was so happy, I felt so free… for the first time. Free to walk down the street hand-in-hand with my boyfriend.

And yes, there were lines here too, but these were different. Optional. Like when you go to a place for brunch and the line is too long, so you just decide to go somewhere else.

But, the other day, my boyfriend insisted on going to see one of those summer blockbusters. You know, the kind of movies that are so hyped it’s almost a social imperative to watch them.

And we went on opening day.

We got to the multiplex roughly two hours early. We’d planned to buy the tickets and then have some dinner.

But the line to the ticket window wrapped around the block.

I asked my boyfriend if we could try again another day but he wasn’t budging.

And I didn’t complain.

As we took our place, a familiar sadness soon engulfed me; the sadness of standing in a line…  but this felt even worse, because I wasn’t waiting for bread or a doctor, I was waiting to see some movie.

I realized we were being duped by a system not much different from my country’s…

We were free to watch another movie (or have lunch in another restaurant), but we were in that file forced by the artificial necessity of being part of the hype, of experiencing, first-hand, what everyone else was talking about. Oh, and being seen while doing it. We craved to belong to something bigger than ourselves; a movie, a sports event, a concert… even voting. Something we could contribute to with very little effort.

We just had to get in line and become a number.

That’s what we did that Friday when we waited for an hour to contribute to the highest grossing opening of all time…until now.

Truth to be said… the movie sucked balls.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016